Public Safety

PCTEL Inc.

Up to the Test

PCTEL’s products support the missions of first responders.

By Alan Dorich

When first responders arrive at an emergency scene in a building, they need to have reliable coverage for wireless communications. That way, they can properly do their jobs for the people whose lives depend on them while staying safe themselves.

Today, that is a challenge. In fact, the Safer Building Coalition estimates that "in a large percentage of buildings, critical communication can't happen." But PCTEL Inc. helps ensure that reliability.

Based in Bloomingdale, Ill., the company provides precision antennas, scanning receivers, test tools, and RF hardware design, testing, radio integration, and manufacturing capabilities for deployment of wireless technologies. “We’ve been in the wireless test and measurement business for almost 20 years,” Senior Vice President and General Manager of RF Solutions Jeff Miller says.

PCTEL began as a modem company in 1998, but moved into the wireless market in 2003. The company largely focused on the licensed cellular market before moving into public safety.

“We saw public safety as an area that was underserved and had solutions that weren’t totally robust,” Miller says.

Senior Product Manager David Adams adds that the time was right for PCTEL to branch out. “Moving into public safety is a natural way for us to more broadly leverage and monetize our technology,” he says.

FirstNet, he explains, has created awareness for public safety coverage, particularly in areas like in-building. “This is driving some of the market and is helping build awareness of the need for validation/certification of the in-building environments,” Adams says.

Dominant Product

PCTEL’s products for the public safety market include its SeeGull® flex scanning receivers, which can test indoor and outdoor cellular, Wi-Fi and public safety networks around the world. For example, its IBflex® scanning receiver is used for inbuilding and small cell testing.

“Our IBflex is the dominant in-building product in the U.S. marketplace,” Adams says. PCTEL also has its MXflex® scanning receiver, which is used for testing complex heterogeneous and multi-operator environments.

When the receivers pull power measurements, the information is sent to PCTEL’s data collection software, SeeHawk® Touch, which analyzes the performance of LTE, Wi-Fi- and other wireless networks. Touch, Adams notes, can be used for various applications, including outdoor drive tests and indoor walk tests.

It also can be used with grid tests, which are specific to public safety and new to Touch, but are not typically available in other tools at this time. Touch takes the RF data and overlays it onto a floor plan that has been put into a grid.

“It takes measurements, drops them into a grid and defines critical areas that are essential for first responder coverage,” Miller says. “It allows you to collect this data and run it against predefined pass/fail criteria.”

A tight integration between planning tools and collection tools provides tremendous value and Touch includes tight integration with iBwave. The design information is seamlessly available to the user of the collection tool, allowing immediate access to the design information. The measurements are provided automatically to the designer using iBwave to improve the design process.

This approach allows the process to be performed faster than it was done in the past. “People have been using spectrum analyzers, charts and graph paper to do this stuff,” he says. “By leveraging this into our Touch data collection platform, we were able to automate this and make it more efficient.”

For example, when PCTEL provided this technology to Day Wireless for the testing of a tunnel, it provide a time savings of 72 percent, cutting the work hours from 56 to 15-and-a-half. In addition, the quality of data and reporting exceeded the fire code and contract requirements.

Providing Capability

As PCTEL has entered the public safety market, it has needed to meet the requirements of multiple players. These can range from municipalities to the National Fire Protection Agency to the Department of Homeland Security.

“Everyone has their own spin on things,” Miller says. “We’re trying to harmonize those requirements so we have a solution that meets the largest superset of those.”

PCTEL also visits its clients at their offices to learn about their business. “We’re able to get into more personal discussions,” he says. “The important thing you can do is say, ‘Show me how you do this work,’ and you talk to them about their challenges.”

These visits, Adams notes, lead to conversations about how PCTEL’s products can help its clients. “You start doing the what if, where you say, ‘What if you had a tool that did X, Y or Z?’” he says.

In fact, this was how PCTEL was able to help Day Wireless, Miller adds. “At the end of the day, it’s all about meeting customers’ needs and finding solutions, and protecting the first responders,” he says.

“They need to have reliable, robust communications that support their mission,” Miller continues. “We work through a number of partners to provide that capability.”

Marching On

PCTEL plans to continue adding new technologies to its offerings. “We’re looking at automating a thing called discriminated audio quality – or DAQ,” Miller says, noting that the company should develop it in the next year to 18 months for the public safety market.

Currently, he explains, DAQ is determined by having two parties talk to each other and then assign a voice quality score between zero and five, where five is crystal clear audio. “Obviously, this inserts a human element to the process, which makes it difficult to calibrate across dialects and speech rates,” Miller says.

“PCTEL can measure bit and frame error rates, which are easily quantified and map that back to an equivalent DAQ score,” he continues. “The challenge is getting the various bodies involved to agree on a unified scoring methodology.”

The company also is working on licensed technology in 5G, although the industry is a few years away from consumer grade 5G. However, “as the wireless technologies march on, you’ll see 5G in the public safety applications,” he predicts.

PCTEL also will see more developments with regulations, Adams predicts. “It’s really just beginning where jurisdictions are enforcing that building owners do the test, make sure the networks work in their buildings, put in a system to fix it and prove [that they] did it,” he says.

Some of the specifications have been around for more than a decade, but they have been difficult and expensive to enforce without PCTEL’s tools. “We expect a 1,000-fold increase in the amount of testing that needs to be done,” he adds.